Friday’s attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo by protestors marching from Tahrir Square and the subsequent harsh security crackdown could become an epic fail for the Egyptian revolution. That’s not because Egyptians shouldn’t protest against Israel if that’s what angers them, and it’s not because the incident is likely to escalate to war. It’s because the incident could easily become an excuse for the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF) to postpone elections, expand rather than surrender its Emergency Law powers, and avoid the transfer of power to a legitimate civilian government. What’s more, these moves might now win applause rather than condemnation among key constituencies: revolutionaries who were already skeptical of elections, liberals worried that Islamists will win, and Americans and others abroad worried about the implications of Egyptian democracy for Israel.
This would be a terrible mistake. The absence of any legitimate political institutions seven months after Mubarak’s fall and the SCAF’s arbitrary and unaccountable rule are what created the political vaccuum which has brought Egypt to this edge. Yesterday’s chaos should not be taken as a reason to postpone a democratic transition. It should instead be a powerful reminder of the urgency of sticking to the timeline for elections and getting on with the business of building an Egyptian democracy. Those who care about Egypt completing its revolution should now be doubling down on the urgency of a real democratic transition — not backing away from it. [[BREAK]]
I’m not going to go over what happened Friday night yet again, or repeat what I wrote last week about how Egypt got to this point — for a review, go read my introduction to the new POMEPS Brief on the State of the Egyptian Revolution (free download). I’ll just say that Friday’s protest has hardly resolved the growing strategic and identity problems of a protest movement divided between revolutionaries and liberals and struggling to connect with an impatient and frustrated Egyptian public. The September 9 Tahrir demonstration had been meant to "correct the path" of the revolution after this summer’s struggles. Even before the Embassy incident, the results had been mixed. It generated very real energy and enthusiasm among the participants, and activists have high hopes that the energy will carry over to a wave of strikes across the country planned for this and coming weeks. Despite the relatively small turnout (maybe 20,000) and the cacophany of different demands muddying the message, people in Tahrir on Friday reported positive energy and more enthusiasm than had been felt in months.
Activists and observers disagree unusually sharply about the Israeli Embassy storming. The international response has been almost universally negative, with the Western media filled with images of a violent mob and a revolution gone awry. The pessimists about the Arab uprisings are claiming vindication. Many Egyptian liberals as well watched horrified, convinced that the revolutionaries had just given the SCAF all the excuse it needed to crack down even harder. They see Friday’s chaos as a dangerous move away from demanding democracy and domestic reform. Many people are darkly speculating that the Israeli Embassy incident must have been a set-up by the SCAF (why was the Embassy so lightly guarded) or by Islamists to discredit the revolution (even if Islamists by all accounts were absent from the scene).
The most fervent online revolutionaries, by contrast, consider the attack on the Embassy and the flight of the Israeli Embassy staff a great success. Revolutions require escalation and street conflict, especially when the SCAF has proven (in their eyes) that it will not change without real popular pressure. They seem baffled by the hand-wringing of critics, don’t care about international perceptions, and doubt whether the SCAF could get any worse (Sarah Carr gives an eloquent presentation of this perspective here). Protesting against Israel is genuinely popular among Egyptians, some reckon, and allows them a rare opportunity to outflank cautious Islamists on the nationalist card.
In my view, the greatest tragedy of the Embassy crisis is that the most urgent demands articulated for September 9 have been completely lost. Last week’s major demands were urgent and compelling: ending military trials, judicial and police reform, and setting a timetable for a return to civilian rule. Nobody is talking about those issues today. All the talk instead is of the storming of the Israeli Embassy and the resulting chaos. The gap between the different strands of the January 25 coalition has never seemed wider. Those who hope for rapid, fundamental political change towards democracy are on the defensive. And the move against the Israeli Embassy feels depressingly familiar rather than revolutionary. How could the very activists who began their campaign by demonstrating in Tahrir in support of the Palestinian Intifada ten years ago forget that Hosni Mubarak happily let protestors demonstrate against Israel as long as they avoided domestic issues?
These are issues for Egyptians to resolve. But here in Washington I can only urge the Obama administration, Congress, and the American public not to allow the incident to be used as an excuse to delay elections or to avoid serious reforms. They should not accept the SCAF’s arguments that this weekend shows the need for a strong hand and a delay of democratic reforms. The needs for ending military trials and for judicial and police reform are just as urgent today as they were yesterday. The need for a transition to rule by a fairly elected civilian government has never been more clear. The SCAF’s ongoing, arbitrary and unaccountable military rule — along with its increasingly reckless fomenting of a xenophobic nationalism – created the conditions for yesterday’s clashes. Allowing the SCAF to back away from real institutional reforms and a timeline for elections would kill what hopes remain for Egyptian democracy, empower radicals, discredit and block those who have committed to preparing for elections, and force people back into the streets for lack of other alternatives. That’s would only guarantee that the crisis will get worse.
Source: http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/10/the_israeli_embassy_disaster
The State Department has opened a brand-new office to manage U.S. policy toward countries attempting democratic transitions in the Middle East.
William Taylor, senior vice president for conflict management at the U.S. Institute of Peace, has moved over to Foggy Bottom to lead the new office, called the Middle East Transitions office, which began operations this week. His deputy is Tamara Cofman Wittes, who is now dual hatted, also continuing on deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. Taylor’s chief of staff is Karen Volker, who until August was director of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), which is now directed by Tom Vajda. MEPI also falls under Wittes’ portfolio. Taylor reports up to Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman.
In a Monday interview with The Cable, Taylor said his office will begin by leading State Department coordination on policy toward Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, the three Middle East countries that are trying to make the shift from dictatorship to democracy.
"The idea is we want to focus energy and policy attention on how we support these three transition countries," he said. "The idea is to be sure this gets top-level attention in the department."
Taylor’s office will have about 10 to 12 people, and he said he hopes to soon add a resident senior advisor from both USAID and the Pentagon. The office is meant to be permanent, and would expand its operations to cover countries like Syria and Yemen — if and when those countries attempt a democratic transition.
Taylor’s first job will be to lead an effort to develop support strategies for Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Then, his office will go about trying to implement those strategies by working within State, around the interagency process, and then with international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations, and stakeholders on the ground. Taylor said he will attend National Security Council meetings on issues related to his brief.
In President Barack Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East, he promised to work on establishing enterprise funds for Egypt and Tunisia, which are accounts meant to support start up programs and activities abroad, and said that U.S. support for democracy will "be based on ensuring financial stability; promoting reform; and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy — starting with Tunisia and Egypt."
Taylor said that the administration was still eager to pursue enterprise funds for these countries, but that legislation would be needed to get it done.
"We’re looking at the possibly of enterprise funds model as a possible model for these transition countries but we’re going to need a lot of support from Congress," he said, adding that State would also ask Congress for authorizations and appropriations to support the new transitions initiative at State. New funding for diplomatic initiatives is a tough sell in this tight fiscal environment, but transition funding does have some support in both parties.
Taylor was chosen for the job in part because he played a key role in a similar diplomatic effort following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991, the State Department put together the Freedom Support Act Office, which managed relations with former members of the Soviet bloc.
That office was run by Ambassador Richard Armitage and reported up to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Taylor worked for Armitage in that office and eventually became its director, a position he held until 2001. The Freedom Support Act Office was combined with the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) office and still exists today.
Taylor was U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, and before that served as Washington’s envoy to the Mideast Quartet. In 2004 and 2005, he directed the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office in Baghdad, and from 2002 to 2003 he served in Kabul as coordinator of U.S. government and international assistance to Afghanistan.
Tampa Bay trailed Boston by 11 games through Aug. 7, but are 24-12 since, including a 9-2 victory in Thursday?s opener of a four-game set.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=65fea80a12cb9b5b53eca01b3338f96a
Reading Joel Wing’s roundup of violence stats from Iraq, and thinking about today’s bombing and yesterday’s massacre of 22 Shiite pilgrims, I began to wonder if the U.S. withdrawal from the war is succeeding — that is, not ending the war, but simply decoupling from it. According to Wing, even as no American troops were killed in Iraq last month, the upward trend in violence increased. Here is the average daily death count:
April: 7.1
May: 8.1
June: 9.4
July: 8.0
Aug: 10.2
According to a number of blogs, for a brief period today there was an app/game available in Apple’s iTunes store illustrating some of the more controversial aspects of the iPhone’s supply chain. Here a description from the website of producer MolleIndustria:
Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. Under the shiny surface of our electronic gadgets, behind its polished interface, hides the product of a troubling supply chain that stretches across the globe. Phone Story represents this process with four educational games that make the player symbolically complicit in coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labor in China, e-waste in Pakistan and gadget consumerism in the West.
Keep Phone Story on your device as a reminder of your impact. All of the revenues raised go directly to workers’ organizations and other non-profits that are working to stop the horrors represented in the game.
Remarkably, the game made it past Apple’s initial review, but was removed today. Kyle Orland at Gamasutra writes:
But shortly after the game was announced and made available for purchase on the App Store earlier this morning, MolleIndustria tweeted that it had been removed for violating four separate app store review guidelines (as noticed by sister site IndieGames.com).
The cited guidelines prohibit apps that "depict violence or child abuse," "present objectionable or crude content," "contain false, fraudulent of misleading representations" or fail to "comply with all legal requirements."
Maybe they could produce a spin-off for Android market, where the requirements are less stringent? It’s not like Apple’s the only company using African coltan and FoxConn labor to make its phones.
Hat Tip: Several folks via Twitter
One of four trapped miners was found dead early Friday as rescue efforts continued in the flooded mine in Wales, British authorities said.
Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~3/Kq3RYIfb_dE/index.html
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer today that the Libyan people will have to decide whether to try Muammar al-Qaddafi themselves for crimes against his people, or surrender him to face justice before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
"This is something that must be decided not by the United States or any other government, but by the people of Libya and by the interim transitional government that we expect will soon be constituted," Rice said. "These are all choices that the Libyan people will ultimately have to make for them."
Not so fast. A statement issued today by ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said that any decision on where Qaddafi and two of his associates will be tried must be made by the Hague-based court’s judges, not the Libyan people.
The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution in late February granting the ICC authority to prosecute top Libyan officials for their role in a bloody government crackdown on protesters. The court’s judges issued an arrest warrant in June for Qaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and his intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi on charges of committing crimes against humanity.
The ICC prosecutor’s performance with regards to the Libya conflict has so far been bumpy. On Monday, Moreno-Ocampo announced that he had been informed that rebel forces had arrested Saif al-Islam. Today, his spokesman acknowledged that the prosecutor had only heard this information from a secondhand source, which turned out to be wrong.
With the prospects of Qaddafi’s capture growing by the hour, the country’s rebel leaders have expressed an interest in prosecuting the three Libyan leaders themselves. Ibrahim Dabbashi, Libya’s former deputy U.N. ambassador and a representative for the opposition, told reporters in New York that the Libyan opposition would like to try Qaddafi for war crimes inside Libya, but that they are in talks with the ICC on how to proceed.
But legal scholars and court advocates say the decision is not up to the Libyan people.
Richard Dicker, a court advocate at Human Rights Watch, said that the U.N. Security Council "took the matter out of the hands of the Libyan people." That decision, he said, reflected a judgment that the Libyan judicial system, undermined by four decades of autocratic rule, did not have the capacity to conduct a fair trial of the three accused men.
Dicker recalled that Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC) pledged in a letter to the ICC prosecutor to cooperate with his investigation, and surrender Qaddafi and the two others to the court. [[BREAK]]
"Contrary to Ambassador Rice’s statement — while of course there will need to be national trials in Libya — for the three ICC accused there is a binding obligation to arrest and surrender them for fair trial in The Hague," Dicker said.
James Goldston, the executive director of the Open Society’s Justice Initiative, said a new Libyan government would be obliged to execute any ICC arrest warrants against the Qaddafi officials, but that it could make a case to the court that Libyans "have the power and the will to try these people."
"It will have to be the ICC judges that will make the final determination as to whether any domestic proceeding comply with requirements of the Rome Statute," he said, referring to the treaty establishing the ICC.
A statement from Moreno-Ocampo’s office confirmed that ICC judges "will decide on the proper forum to conduct trials" of Qaddafi and the two other officials. The statement also said that Moreno-Ocampo had "confirmed his commitment to work with the TNC to stop the crimes in Libya and do justice."
But other analysts believe that the United States is right to support Libyan efforts to prosecute Qaddafi in Libya, saying it would provide the new government with a chance to shore up its legitimacy and prove that it can pursue a just end to its own problems.
"This is the right policy choice if Libya can prove capacity + ability to administer impartial justice," Michael Hanna, an analyst at the Century Foundation, wrote on Twitter today.
Follow me on Twitter @columlynch
Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia may be attempting to revive public support ahead of elections which many believe could be called by early next year.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=87b91138b68f02712848c67c6ad346f4
Maen Rashid Areikat, the PLO representative to Washington, told The Cable today that stories claiming he called for a Palestinian state free of Jews are a "fabrication."
The Daily Caller was the first to report Areikat’s remarks, made at a Wednesday breakfast with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Areikat was responding to a question by Daily Caller reporter Jamie Weinstein, who asked whether he imagined that Jews could have a political role in a future Palestinian state.
"Well, you know, I personally still believe as a first step we need to be totally separated and we can contemplate these issues in the future. But after the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict of friction, I think it would be in the best interests of the two peoples to be separated first," Areikat said, according to a recording of the session provided to The Cable.
The Daily Caller headlined the story, "Palestinian ambassador reiterates call for a Jew-free Palestinian state," and a similar story in USA Today was entitled, "PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews." The comments also evoked condemnations from top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who accused the Palestinian Authority of adopting a Judenrein policy, referring to the Nazi drive to cleanse Germany of any Jews.
"It’s not a misquotation or out of context, it’s a total fabrication," Areikat said in an interview today. "I never mentioned the word ?Jews,’ I never said that Palestine has to be free of Jews."
Areikat said that he stands by his call for "separation," but that he intended to refer to the separation of the Israel and Palestinian peoples, not the members of the two religions. Areikat also said that the idea of "separation" is an Israeli idea and that Israeli officials including Defense Minister Ehud Barak have endorsed it.
"Israeli people includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze… When I say the Israeli people, I mean everybody. This is not a religious conflict, this is not against Jews. We want to be a secular state," Areikat said.
"This was a total set-up," Areikat said, adding that Weinstein followed him to his car after the breakfast meeting. "He followed me to my car and asked me if I would allow homosexuals to live in Palestine. I didn’t know he was trying to implicate me. It was all premeditated."
Actually, it was the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack who asked Areikat the question about homosexuals. Areikat responded that "this is an issue that’s beyond my [authority]," McCormack reported.
This is the second time in as many years that Areikat has been mired in controversy related to the future status of Jews in a Palestinian state. In an October 2010 interview with Tablet Magazine, he said, "We need to separate. We have to separate…. I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state."
The war of words comes only days before Areikat, Netanyahu, and hundreds of other world leaders will converge on New York for the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly, where a top issue will be the PLO’s plan to seek member-state status by appealing to the U.N. Security Council.
State Department Acting Special Envoy David Hale and the National Security Council’s Dennis Ross are in the West Bank this week, meeting with top Palestinian officials in a last-ditch attempt to convince the Palestinians not to go through with their plan.
Areikat said the action at the United Nations would probably fall on Sept. 20, and the Obama administration was unlikely to dissuade the Palestinians from moving forward.
"There is a sense of urgency on the part of the administration," said Areikat. "They understand the implications. But unless they really offer something tangible it will be like the [unsuccessful] last visit that [Hale and Ross] had last week."
Here is the full exchange between Weinstein and Areikat:
JW: What kind of state do you perceive the independent Palestinians to be? For instance, do you imagine that in an independent Palestinian state, a Jew could be elected mayor of Ramallah?
MA: I haven’t seen the draft resolution but I can assure you the resolution will be calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. And it will definitely include also that it will live side by side in peace and security with Israel…
JW: To my point, do you foresee in an independent Palestinian state, for instance, a member of the Jewish minority there, if they existed, being elected mayor of Ramallah?
MA: Well, you know, I personally still believe as a first step we need to be totally separated and we can contemplate these issues in the future. But after the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict of friction, I think it would be in the best interests of the two peoples to be separated first.
Listen to the tape for yourself here:
UPDATE: Weinstein wrote into The Cable to respond to Areikat’s charge that Weinstein followed him to his car:
I followed him to his car not to trap the ambassador, but to give him an opportunity to clarify his comments. I asked two times while at his car whether ‘Jews,’ not Israelis, would be allowed in the West Bank or Gaza in a future Palestinian state and he said two times that they had to be separated. To frame it like I was trying to trap him is absurd. It was just the opposite. I was giving him the opportunity to clarify his comments. I only found out later that he had said the same thing before in an interview with Tablet magazine.